greetings from the inside

Greetings from the inside of my undereye skin, where I spend an inordinate amount of time lately- there, and my guts. My eyes tell me I am exhausted, I am weak, I am excited, I am intellectually stimulated, I am happy, I am sad, I am facing inward or outward; my stomach tells me I am sick, I am pregnant, I am acidic and roiling, I am taking it all in or forcing it all out, I am afraid, I am honest, I am smelling something delicious smelling something terribly foul like underarm sour or the soft flat wetness of roadkill that hurts my heart daily.

I roam through my house absorbed and agitated with all I want to do and my physical self will not let me do without chills, vomit, faintness; I feel reduced to a Victorian womankind, weak and lightheaded, swooning and often bedridden. Oh I am in the family way. I am carrying child. I am carrying children. I often carry my own self like a shadow person, observing with great resentment the goings on of the buttery fleshed woman on my shoulders. I want to scrape corners clean with a toothbrush. I want to work like my red headed mother did when I was a child, without an outside world job, burnishing the house into a gleaming shining empire of cleanliness and smoothness. I want to strip walls, paint, rip up carpet, buy new sheets, patch holes in the wall, shave my husband's burly facial hair into a neater nest. I want to reduce to manage.

There is no sex for the first three months, we agreed. This baby will not come out of my womb on any violotion of mine, we are encouraging him or her with our sexless orgasmless prescence to nourish and cling to the uterine walls, the placenta. I don't take caffiene, or gluten. I abstain.

Days pass and the child absorbs more than the calcium in my bones, there are hours of sleep given, there are legs crossed and trips untaken, there are plans unmade and a house unkept, there is the reduction. There is hope and wanting for pink baby flesh and smooth eyes like thumbprints of the other side we will gaze in for the first few months, to see what has been seen and like Mary Poppins knew, will be forgotten as the child grows in this world and leaves the etherworld behind. All is transformed.

My children rub my stomach and my husband weighs my breasts with large working hands like two great scales. I am purple nippled and rounded, I am inward. I am exactly the pod around the seed which keeps quiet until the great song is sung and the flower erupts with all it's smell and shape and movement and reach.

I am 11 weeks. I am burgeoning with hope. Let us make this all the way..

Happy Mother's Day